He was mostly right, of course. Taking a science elective
was mandatory.
I have never been a nerd, except that my relative success in
the humanities in high school probably branded me that in the mouths of what we
now call the STEM people (Science, Technology, Engineering,
Mathematics). Experience had taught me that an orange rolling off the table
will end up on the floor, not on the ceiling, but under the cold, dry
pronouncement of Dr. Surly, I suddenly became enamoured with the possibility that
certain speeds of falling (including terminal velocity) could be calculated mathematically as could the strength of gravitational attraction in relation to
material size. (My heights-and-falling-phobia may have been implicated here.)
My days of wondering why, “if an orange in Canada falls down,
why doesn’t an orange in China fall … well, up?” were over. Perhaps the
attraction came from thinking that Hamlet learning of his mother’s unfaithfulness
would inevitably lead to his estrangement from Ophelia. Gravity (in both
its definitions) would become integral to plot developments studied in Can.
Lit. 101 as well as in Dr. Surly’s half-hearted curriculum.
Physics, the study of the behaviour of things physical.
Although behaviour seems the wrong word, as if some choice is allowed an
oxygen atom when it bumps into the hydrogen twins on the street and ponders
whether or not to pursue forming a water molecule with them. (Sorry, Chemistry,
but you’re just a thin branch of Physics in the end.) “Natural laws are
immutable, indestructible, 100% predictable, all the time,” Dr. Surly would
intone. “There never have been, are not now, and never will be miracles—if miracle
means that the laws of nature can be thwarted.” With one wave of his
chalk-wand, he turned seventy-five Sunday-schoolers into agnostics; all the water-walkers
sank as one.
But, my slowly-awakening, undergraduate mind protested:
“Human behaviour is not immutable, predictable. Estrangement doesn’t progress
at a specific velocity, is not bound by a terminal speed either. Hamlet doesn’t
have to drive Ophelia to suicide. Neither are the odds of a certain choice mathematically
calculatable.”
Inadvertently, accidentally, Dr. Surly provided much to the
education of the Humanities-bound students in that lecture theatre. For those
who would enter careers in what was called, “English teaching,” the dichotomy
posed by the material and the emotional would be foundational to everything
from literary criticism; to logic; to story construction; to first learning,
then transmitting the deepest essentials of human experience to malleable,
youthful minds.
Oranges continue to fall earthward, both in Canada and
China. And Ophelia will continue to
drown herself in front of high school students annually … and predictably, and her
friend Laertes will make that silly comment: “Too much of water hast thou, poor
Ophelia,/And therefore I forbid my tears … (Hamlet: IV, vii)
And in classrooms everywhere, a young man will fall asleep
on his palms, elbows on his desk, but will produce a startling, lecture-stopping
bang when his head-prop slips and gravity smashes his acned face into Hamlet:
IV, vii.
Isn’t Physics wonderful? Thank you, Dr. Surly.